King Kong Ping-Pong Exhibition Stand

In 2017 I was tasked to design an exhibition stand for two shows Graphica Display would be exhibiting at. The only specifics of the brief were, it had to show-off Graphica’s in-house manufacturing techniques, and it had to include a regulation-size ping-pong table. The art-direction and all the details were up to me to figure out.

The only other guidance I had to consider were the location of the stand in relation to its neighbours, and existing elements Graphica had for me to use, if I wished. These were the four, three-metre high lightboxes that made up the walls of the stand; two 0.5 metre wide; one 2.8 metre wide, and one 3 metre wide.

With a basic plan in place, step two was to design the look of the table.

I knew that I didn’t want a plain-looking table. It would have to fit into the regulation dimensions, but otherwise, I would make it unique.

On my search for inspiration, I considered one of the tables in our workshop. Used for vinyl preparation, it has a lightbox with a diffused acrylic top which gives a soft, even source of illumination.

It also happens that acrylic is a pretty great playing surface for ping pong. So a lightbox seemed like the way to go. 

With a rough plan of how the table would function, I turned my attention to the artwork we would use on the lightbox walls and the overall artistic direction of the stand.

A lot of the discussions we had were around the table and the use of light. We looked at various options; we were considering electroluminescent (EL) wire to light parts of the stand and table. This led us to look at “Tron” style art direction, but it was dismissed this as being too dark.

Then the client suggested we go with something inspired by the now iconic iPod adverts with the dancing silhouettes, instead of holding white iPods, they could hold white paddles. I mocked up some samples in Photoshop, but the concept needed more work.

I then started looking at the net. If I was illuminating the table, then the net should be illuminated too. A regular net wouldn't cut it, so I experimented with laser-etching a pattern into clear acrylic. When given edge-illumination, the etching catches the light, and you stop seeing the acrylic itself. The samples we made took over an hour to etch. Once it finished, I tested it with some LED strips and the effect was exactly right.

While drawing the paddles, I was still trying to establish the overall look of the stand. I wasn’t satisfied with the “iPod Silhouette” style, and didn’t think it would convey enough of what we wanted it to.

I went through lots of ideas, but it wasn’t until I found this image on Flickr (which also had an applicable Creative Commons licence) that I found my theme .At first, I didn’t give it much thought and kept on looking, but after a day or two my mind kept going back to it, and I knew that pop art was the way to go. I then sourced more images through a stock-image account and between that and my own drawings came up with these...

With the paddles drawn it was clear that the rest of the stand would become pop-art themed. I went to work drawing up the two primary lightboxes, the two smaller lightboxes, the rear wall of the stand, and the stud wall. The stud wall was the only non pop art piece which was intentional to break up the wall a bit, I went with a whitewashed brick look, drawing inspiration from old pool halls. All together the walls looked like this…

The floor came soon after. At first I didn’t know what a pop art floor would look like, but it turns out Roy Lichtenstein had already answered that for me. His piece “Wallpaper with blue floor Interior” lead me to create my version using a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator.

With the art direction coming together nicely, I had to turn my attention back to the table. I knew the overall dimensions already, and I had a couple of other dimensions answered for me.

The top would be 100mm thick as that's a safe minimum for how deep a lightbox should be - any thinner and the LEDs don’t diffuse properly. 

I still wasn’t sure how to make the legs. Or even what they should look like. I knew how tall they should be, and I knew I didn't want them to look like normal legs. 

I went into the workshop with a pad of paper, gathered the team together and started scribbling down ideas. I knew what I didn’t want, but not what I wanted. The guys in the workshop would be the ones who made it and knew the materials better than me and what was and wasn’t possible.

We started hashing out ideas and came up with all sorts of weird and wonderful designs. Then one of the guys jokingly suggested making the legs a giant “G” and “D” for Graphica Display. We laughed, and then immediately realised that would be the way to go. The letters could be cut from MDF on the router and do the whole thing in-house. I took all the scribbled drawings upstairs and, combining them with the fixed dimensions of the table, came up with this:

I went with a super extended font, to ensure that the letters had as much grounding as possible. I then worked out the cutter paths for the shapes, basing everything on 18mm MDF.
For the curved elements, I used 6mm flexible MDF. That led me to a breakdown of the legs that looked like this:

The only thing still to look at at this stage was the artwork for the table itself. My original thought when I came up with the idea for a lightbox a couple of weeks earlier was to have the company logo lit-up, and that be the primary focus, with the company colours incorporated in. 

But now the legs were giant initials, and the rest of the stand had gone pop art, that idea seemed a bit weak in comparison. I went back to my research and looked at the origins of pop-art. I loved the 50’s style and wanted to make something comic-book-esque, but that still fit with the stand. Again, inspiration came from the team in the workshop. One of the guys had suggested we do King Kong ping-pong and it was an idea that had stuck. I started drawing and realised that King Kong would need a worthy adversary, and who better than Godzilla? With a sweet, retro halftone pattern the two sides of the table came together.

The final piece the table needed was the net. We’d come such a long way since the first test with the laser etching, and I no longer felt it fit with the rest of the design. Instead we looked at edge-lit acrylic, which is very vivid and almost gives the effect of lighting itself from ambient light around it. I imagined a world where King Kong and Godzilla were clashing and saw a ruined city with tanks and other military vehicles trying to stop the carnage, and came up with this:

And that was the design of the table complete!

With the first event looming, manufacture began, and I focused on making handouts and giveaways for the show. We came up with the idea of printing t-shirts based on the stand, something I know a fair bit about. And for every future show, we would do a unique t-shirt design. I went back to the original image that inspired my designs and came up with these designs for the two upcoming shows:

Because there’s always one last-minute addition.

The last thing we had to make was the display cabinets for the sample material paddles. These changed quite close to the deadline for the first show to include storage inside. I redesigned them, and we fabricated them and painted them to match the legs of the table.

See the stand coming together at the VM & Display Show.

The stand went into the VM & Display show without a hitch, and we got some great feedback for it, both in person and on social media.